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The Eerie, Crumbling Bunkers of the Nazis' Atlantic Wall

Kirkness, Norway

Guernsey, Channel Islands

Quiberville, France

Hanstholm, Denmark

Vigo, Denmark

Muiden, Netherlands

Berck, France

Capbreton, France

Lokken, Denmark

Huequeville, France

As the war in Europe raged through the early 1940s, Germany built thousands of concrete bunkers to defend the continent's western shore from an Allied sea attack. This Atlantic Wall stretched from Norway to the border of France and Spain, and what remains all these decades later is darkly beautiful.

Photographer Stephan Vanfleteren, 44, grew up near some of these structures as a child living in Belgium, but never thought much of them. They were just crumbling concrete relics of the past. That changed last year, however, when he returned to the Belgian coast to photograph bunkers for the Museum Atlantikwall at Raversyde–Belgium. Seeing them with fresh eyes, he was immediately taken by their graceful, elegant design. He produced a series of beautiful black and white photographs that soon will be released as a book.

“Some of the buildings reminded me of the Guggenheim museum or the Fallingwater house by Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Vanfleteren, who still lives in Belgium. “These were buildings made for strategic defense but there was also real beauty and a connection with modern architecture.”

Vanfleteren was of course acutely aware of the history associated with the buildings, so he made sure to balance his approach. Although he found the buildings beautiful, he didn’t try to stylize or dramatize them by shooting with artificial lights or at night. Instead, his work is purely documentary, an attempt to let the structures speak for themselves. “The buildings are innocent," he says, "but there’s still the association.”

While shooting, Vanfleteren says he thought a lot about the immensity of the project, which the Nazis built between 1942 and 1945. The Atlantic Wall was an enormous and a mindboggling undertaking: The Third Reich built thousands of bunkers along 1,670 miles of coastline, many of them in remote and rugged areas that required great feats of engineering and often left him wondering, "How did this get here?"

Even now, many bunkers remain difficult to reach, and Vanfleteren occasionally found himself in dangerous spots. While shooting on the Channel Islands, an enormous wave caught him off guard and swept thousands of dollars of his camera equipment into the sea. He escaped injury, but the experience put a scare in him. “As I saw my bag drifting away I thought, 'That could be me,'" he says.

Many of the bunkers are located along beautiful settings on the Atlantic coast, so the landscape often is as important as the structure in the photograph. And after decades of neglect–little effort was made in the decades after the war to preserve the bunkers–many of them have slowly eroded away and are themselves becoming part of the landscape. When Vanfleteren talked to locals, many told him the eroding bunkers have become a symbol of environmental changes. Bunkers that used to sit well back from the ocean are now right at the waters edge, for example, and many locals consider this a barometer, a sign of global climate change and a rising sea.

Maps posted online reveal the location of many bunkers, and there are forums in which people describe them. Yet there were times when Vanfleteren would arrive at a spot expecting to find a bunker and instead see nothing. On some occasions, he'd call his wife and asked her to check Google Earth for directions. Other times, he’d simply wander about until he found what he'd come for. It was a lonely endeavor–a point conveyed in the photos–but a welcome relief from the hustle and bustle of modern life. Vanfleteren could only work on the project for a couple weeks at a time, but began to cherish his time alone with his camera.

“After a while it wasn’t a commission but instead a mission,” he says. “I became very addicted to the project.”